Contemporary Chinese Philosophy

Contemporary Chinese Philosophy

Chung-Ying Cheng, Nicholas Bunni

Language: English

Pages: 446

ISBN: 2:00276519

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub

Contemporary Chinese Philosophy features discussion of sixteen major twentieth-century Chinese philosophers. Leading scholars in the field describe and critically assess the works of these significant figures.
Critically assesses the work of major comtemporary Chinese philosophers that have rarely been discussed in English.
Features essays by leading scholars in the field.
Includes a glossary of Chinese characters and definitions.

nonempirical because contradictions and paradoxes tend to arise once it is applied to justifying practical acts or personal cultivation pertaining to good and evil. Hence I have deliberately pointed out this fact in the hope that young scholars in China will save up their breath by not engaging themselves in such fruitless debates over human nature. (Wang, 1904 “Lun Xing” [“On Human Nature”] in Wang, 1997) Wang examined li (principle) in relation to Schopenhauer’s principle of sufﬁcient reason

sentence is an exception. This feature of Chinese gives the impression that the subject is dispensable (Zhang, 1946a, p. 180). Another difference is that Chinese lacks Z HANG D ONGSUN 73 the equivalent of the expression “it.” “Zhe” and “ci” in Chinese are equivalent to “this,” but not of “it.” “It” is an indeﬁnite pronoun, but “this” is not. Chinese lacks sentences of the form “It is.” “It is” expresses only the existence of something and not its attributes, and this separation of existence

inﬂuences include Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Schiller, Mill, Hegel, Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Green, Bergson, Woodbridge, Dewey, Russell, Moore, Wittgenstein, and Foucault. Many of the philosophers were deeply inﬂuenced by their studies abroad in Japan, the United States, Britain, France, Germany, or Austria. Although there were personal rivalries and factional divisions among the philosophers discussed in Contemporary Chinese Philosophy, friendships and inﬂuences

ﬂourishing in Ancient China. The dethronement of Confucianism, therefore, will be assured when it is regarded not as the solitary source of spiritual, moral, and philosophical authority, but merely as one star in a great galaxy of philosophical luminaries. In other words, the future of Chinese philosophy would seem to depend much on the revival of those great philosophical schools that once ﬂourished side by side with the school of Confucius in Ancient China. . . . For my own part, I believe that

in reason, but backward in intellect, whereas the Westerners are advanced in intellect, but backward in reason” (Lixing yu lizhi de fenbie [the distinction between reason and intellect], in Liang, 1989– 93, VI, p. 406). In his ﬁnal analysis, reason is superior to intellect, and, therefore, Chinese culture is higher than its Western counterpart. Liang used two approaches in seeking to verify this superiority. First, he argued that reason represents the true essence of human beings: The intellect